Scarface

Al Pacino stars as Tony Montana, an exiled Cuban criminal who goes to work for Miami drug lord Robert Loggia. Montana rises to the top of Florida's crime chain, appropriating Loggia's cokehead mistress (Michelle Pfeiffer) in the process. Howard Hawks' "X Marks the Spot" motif in depicting the story line's many murders is dispensed with in the 1983 Scarface;/i>…
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Overview

Al Pacino stars as Tony Montana, an exiled Cuban criminal who goes to work for Miami drug lord Robert Loggia. Montana rises to the top of Florida's crime chain, appropriating Loggia's cokehead mistress (Michelle Pfeiffer) in the process. Howard Hawks' "X Marks the Spot" motif in depicting the story line's many murders is dispensed with in the 1983 Scarface; instead, we are inundated with blood by the bucketful, especially in the now-infamous buzz saw scene. One carry-over from the original Scarface is Tony Montana's incestuous yearnings for his sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). The screenplay for the 1983 Scarface was written by Oliver Stone.

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Editorial Reviews

Barnes & Noble - Dave Roth

Updating a classic is a risky, often thankless task. But for director Brian DePalma, re-making the Howard Hawks's gangster masterpiece Scarface proved to be an inspired decision. For without taking anything away from the 1932 version, DePalma created one of the most influential and impressively decadent gangster films ever made. Scarface details the rise and fall of Cuban émigré Tony Montana, a Miami gangster whose pursuit of the American Dream is a ruthless reverie of cocaine and slaughter. DePalma ratchets up the tension in each scene to maximum levels, delivering tragic betrayals and ferocious explosions of violence -- most notably with chainsaws. Al Pacino's performance as Montana remains among his best and boldest, and there are also strong supporting turns by Robert Loggia and a young Michelle Pfeiffer. The film plays like a long cocaine rush, as Tony becomes rich from selling the narcotic, then addicted to it, and finally lost in a murderous paranoid frenzy from it. An intense and sometimes unpleasant experience, Scarface is also a work of consummate skill and intelligence.

All Movie Guide

Infinitely quotable and more than a little cartoonish, Brian De Palma's update of Howard Hawks' seminal gangster film revels in its freedom to be larger than life. A work as akin to pop art as any other form, it reworks the crime melodrama in bold, primary colors, mostly blood red. Attracting a great deal of attention for its violence at the time of its release, the controversy overshadowed the fact that everything in the film ran to extremes, including Pacino's performance, the director's visual style (which found him almost reverting to The Fury mode), the dialogue (from a script co-written by Oliver Stone), and most importantly the themes. Scarface focuses on words like "crime" and "America," then lets itself run wild with the associations. That a classically American rise-and-fall story forms the heart of the film is its simplest and best irony. The experience will probably be thrilling to some, particularly those already enthusiastic about De Palma's work, and extremely off-putting to others. Tony Montana may not be an appealing character with which to spend nearly three hours, but there's little chance of forgetting the experience.